“Now, fits of uproarious laughter came over the group as they described how a human meal might compare to a side dish for a dinosaur. In future iterations of the dinosaur dinner stories, children clamoured to be included, listening with intense interest and nominating themselves and others as the next tasty bite for the dinosaur” (Flynn, Lea, and Hoy 72).
Portland State University School of Social Work Child, Youth, and Family Studies program Associate Professor Erin Flynn recently co-authored the research article “Dinner at Dinosaurland: Invention, Dialogue, & Solidarity in the Early Childhood Classroom” along with PSU Master of Social Work Online alumni members Jessica Lea, a licensed clinical social worker at an intensive outpatient program, and Selena L. Hoy, a bicultural, bilingual social worker and outreach coordinator for TELL, a mental health and suicide prevention nonprofit organization in Tokyo, Japan. Both Lea and Hoy spent a year in Head Start classrooms as part-time research assistants while completing their degrees. This research was supported by a grant from the Caplan Foundation for Early Childhood along with the Portland State University Office of Academic Affairs and was published in the Journal of Childhood Studies. As part of Professor Flynn’s commitment to providing accessible information, this research has been published open access and is freely available to interested readers.
The study took place within an urban Pacific Northwest Head Start that offered a half-day preschool program serving a linguistically and ethnically diverse group of children, many from refugee and immigrant backgrounds, aged 3-5. With hopes to enhance educators’ repertoire of child-centered learning practices, researchers partnered with teachers to introduce a routine classroom activity called story circles.
“Story circles are a small-group storytelling activity in which children take turns telling their own story each week,” the article says, “Story circles have been used in educational, therapeutic, and community-building settings, and have long been valued for centering the common cause of participants in a dialogic exchange”.
It was during a February story circle that a student first mentioned “Dinosaurland,” which would soon serve as a major setting for many of the students’ shared stories and a key example of their collaborative community building. Over the next four months, students had used Dinosaurland as the setting in over 20 of their adventures. The introduction of the idea of students and teachers being devoured by dinosaurs as a meal acted as a catalyst for a new kind of storytelling that was based more on audience engagement. The children began telling stories that would conjure up emotional reactions such as fear or, more often, uproarious laughter.
Storytelling in preschool classrooms has been shown to help build community and develop shared ideas amongst students and teachers. The world of Dinosaurland serves as an example of how child-based storytelling can create the necessary space for children to invent, share, and expand upon ideas.
The influence of storytelling as a classroom practice has been underappreciated in our increasingly stressful, academically packed classrooms as a catalyst for inclusion and collaboration. Story circles provide a time and space for students to engage in dialogue with one another in a way that includes both imagination and lived experience. When properly designed and executed, story circles can provide key insights that can help educators to plan lessons in a way that engages students’ interests, values, and ideas.